The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

and Cheikh Anta Diop. Hansberry, described as a ‘pioneer Africanist’ by his editor, Joseph E. Harris, between 1916 and 1954 developed early African Studies programmes which taught that the Greek pantheon was not just Egyptian, but, beyond Egypt, specifically Ethiopian in origin (1977, 81); that ‘Blacks from Africa had been domiciled in the Aegean lands hundreds of years before Homer’s day’ (23); and that ‘there was a relatively large black population in the Greek world throughout these ages’ (42).

      Diop, a Senegalese academic educated in Paris, took these speculations into the realms of hard history in a work published in 1954, The African Origin of Civilization. To the by now familiar litany that ‘Ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization…. The Ancient Egyptians were Negroes’ (xiv–xv), and that ‘Greece borrowed from Egypt all the elements of her civilization’ (4), Diop added a few wild notions of his own: Egyptian priests ‘had the secret of gunpowder’ (24); all the pharaohs (sic, so presumably including the Hyksos) were ‘Negroid’ (53); ‘all the populations of the periphery of the Mediterranean … were Negroes or Negroid’ (113); pre-Dynastic north Africa had only two population groups, ‘Ethiopians’ (Negroes) and Libyans (whites – a claim that contradicts the previous assertion), the latter of whom were ‘half-starved pilferers living on the periphery of Egypt’ (97); while Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and other classical authors were ‘eyewitnesses’ (2) to events that took place centuries before their time.

      Sad and alarming in these statements, as well as in much of what Shavit calls ‘wild Afrocentrist’ discourse, is the pronounced and aggressive degree of racism: ‘The irony is that Afrocentrism appears to reject scientific dismissal of racial typology, and attempts to confirm a theory which gives deeply rooted prejudices scientific credibility’ (Shavit, 2001, 147). For this reason alone, it would seem justifiable to examine the exact relations and patterns of indebtedness between ancient Egypt and Africa yet again, because it was from these involutions that the European-Mediterranean world inherited its earliest images of Africa and Africans.

      Diop has not been alone in propagating these or even more bizarre views. In 1920, Leo Wiener published his three-volume Africa and the Discovery of America, to prove (mainly by a bewildering display of eclectic linguistics) that large numbers of Negro traders had settled in Central and South America long before 1492, and were largely responsible for Mesoamerican civilisation. And in Stolen Legacy (1954), still being reprinted in 1992 as Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy, George G.M. James managed to prove that all of Western culture is the legacy of an ancient syndicated heist.

      Yaacov Shavit reviews scores of works perpetuating such notions, which have apparently become the orthodoxy of African-American universities. So, for instance, the same Théophile Obenga whose regrets at the pronounced lack of an African dimension to much scholarly Egyptology we noted earlier, has subsequently in his own Ancient Egypt and Black Africa (subtitled ‘A Students’ Handbook’), sought to ‘correct’ the situation with claims as simplistic as the ones they seek to replace (1992). Greek philosophy here becomes a wholly African derivative, and the work subsumes a seamless Egyptian identity with Africa, the sole source of its 3 000 years of achievement. Opponents of such views often risk charges of racism, despite their ability to adduce overwhelming contrary evidence.

      In 1961, Erik Iversen argued persuasively in The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Traditions for a truly African origin of hieroglyphics in Nile desert rock art. He demonstrated, however, the vast difference between this script and the most ancient proto-Greek writing, and went on to extrapolate that these writing systems signified fundamentally different mindsets behind their creation. As to Greek ideology being a direct borrowing or ‘theft’ from Egypt, Iversen demonstrated the extreme unlikelihood of such a genealogy long before Martin Bernal rekindled the debate – as we shall see. He argued for a profound cultural-cognitive incompatibility between Egyptian and Greek thought systems, the former being mythic-mystic, the latter proto-rationalist. This meant that although Egyptian influences on Greek culture could be shown to be substantial, borrowings were usually fundamentally misinterpreted or radically revised (40–41). Such views evidently had little purchase in the world of Cheikh Anta Diop and his followers, ascendant at about the same time.

      Diop repeated his views in numerous publications until they became enshrined in the second volume of the prestigious UNESCO General History of Africa (1981) in their most sweeping form: ‘The earliest men were ethnically homogeneous and Negroid … the facts prove that [the Negro element] was preponderant from the beginning to the end of Egyptian history’ (Mokhtar 1981, 15–6). It must have come as a surprise to the Egyptians to learn that their history had ended.

      Elsewhere Diop and his disciples have variously claimed that the Yoruba, the Kara from southern Sudan and Upper Oubangui, the Kare-Kare from north-eastern Nigeria, the Peul or Fulani, the Tucolor, the Serer, the Wolof, the Songhai and the Amazulu and Basotho of southern Africa ‘all originated in the Nile Valley’ (Shavit, 2001, 208; MacDonald, 2003, 95; and see Ellenberger, 1912 and Folorunso, 2003). I shall return to the remarkable resilience and protean manifestations of this myth of the ubiquitous ‘Ethiopian’ in Africa in later chapters. The genocide and chaos in the eastern Congo, Rwanda and Burundi in recent years has in some part stemmed from just such fiction; in this tragic case, from nineteenth-century missionary claims that the Tutsi descended from ‘superior Ethiopians’ of the Nile region as against the ‘common Negroes’ or the Hutu (De Waal, 1994; Taylor, 1999; Chrétien, 2003; Reid, 2003; Wallis, 2006).

      A generous critic might argue that the claims of Diop and others are intended to mean no more than, or are just confused with, the proposition now generally accepted: that all modern human beings descend from a strain of African Homo sapiens sapiens that left the continent some 100 000 years ago (Leakey and Lewin, 1992, 225; Dawkins, 1995, 53–55; Iliffe, 1995, 9; Sykes, 2001, 50), or, indeed, only 60 000 to 80 000 years ago (Oppenheimer, 2003; Wells, 2006). So, for instance, Legrand Clegg (1985) has argued that the first Europeans were proto-Khoisanoid ‘Grimaldis’ who invaded Europe about 40 000 years ago and were the ancestors of the Cro-Magnon. In the context of the currently unfolding map of human genetic profiling, which is revealing ever more fascinating information about the earliest human migrations, some of these considerations may indeed hold insights to which we shall have to return. The assertion, however, that all Mediterranean peoples were originally ‘Negroid’ usually has a far more specific and aggressive intent in Afrocentrist discourse, and would typically claim to describe human history since Neolithic rather than Palaeolithic times.

      The canonical status of Diop’s views conferred by the UNESCO volume ensured their subsequent axiomatic weight and continuing embellishment in Afrocentrist discourse. For instance, Ivan van Sertima edited a volume of essays in 1985, The African Presence in Early Europe, which extended Diop’s insistence on the wholesale settlement of Neolithic Europe by Negroid people. At least one reviewer felt constrained to expose ‘the sheer sloppiness of the arguments’, the ‘elementary misreadings’, and the ‘persistent perversion of language’ that characterised the collection (Edwards, 1987). Yet the politically seductive attractions of such a rewriting of humankind’s earliest history remain compelling. As George G.M. James argues in Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy (1954), the theft of the African legacy by the Greeks lies at the root of Western race prejudice. One of the leading exponents of Afrocentricity in the United States, Molefi Kete Asante, formerly chair of African-American Studies at Temple University, has in a number of publications – such as Afrocentricity (1988) and Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (1990) – continued to promote and develop Diop’s advocacy of Negroid Africa as the source of Egyptian civilisation and hence of all Western achievement. Asante has further sought to mythologise this monolithic African-Egyptian model into a liberationist cult that can be compared to the rise of millenarian Ethiopianism at the end of the nineteenth century, or the emergence of Rastafarianism in the 1920s (inspired by Ras Tafari, later better known as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia). More recent exponents of ‘wild Afrocentrism’ have drawn much sustenance from the arguments espoused by Martin Bernal in Black Athena, and it is to this work that we turn next.

      The